t, the trader, and
the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were
still occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of
Montreal. The most important, as well as the most distant, of these
regions was on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below
the present city of St. Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and
trading-posts held the center of the tenuous line extending from Canada
to Louisiana. A second was the Illinois country, centering about the
citadel of St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was
the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth
century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of Lake
Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760, forthwith
dispatched to the western country a military force to take possession
of the posts still remaining in the hands of the French. The mission
was entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert
Rogers, who as leader of a band of intrepid "rangers" had made himself
the hero of the northern frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for
the undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen
whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.

At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city
of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and
warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to
know the object of their journeying. Parleys followed, in which Pontiac
himself took part, and it was explained that the French had surrendered
Canada to the English and that the English merely proposed to assume
control of the western posts, with a view to friendly relations between
the red men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming in
endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages, and,
after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and his
followers withdrew.

Late in Novemb